We’re excited to announce that submissions for our 2016 Yemassee Writing Prizes are now open!

The 2016 Yemassee Fiction Contest will be judged by Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn, Gold Fame Citrus). $15 to enter ($17 with subscription). $1,000 prize.

Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California in 1984. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Glimmer Train, Best of the West, Best of the Southwest, The New York Times and many others.

Her collection of short stories, Battleborn, won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Her latest book is Gold Fame Citrus, a novel. 

A Guggenheim Fellow, and one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35,” Claire is on the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.

The 2016 Yemassee Poetry Contest will be judged by Catie Rosemurgy (The Stranger Manual). $15 to enter ($17 with subscription). $1,000 prize.

Catie Rosemurgy’s most recent poetry collection, The Stranger Manual, was published by Graywolf Press. Her work has appeared in such places as The American Poetry Review, The Boston Review, and Better. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at The College of New Jersey.

The 2016 Yemassee Nonfiction Contest will be judged by Matthew Gavin Frank (Preparing the Ghost, The Mad Feast). $10 to enter ($12 with subscription). $500 prize.

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books, The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America’s Food, Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer, Pot Farm, and Barolo, the poetry books, The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and 2 chapbooks. He teaches at Northern Michigan University, where he is the Nonfiction Editor of Passages North. This winter, he tempered his gin with two droplets (per 750ml) of tincture of odiferous whitefish liver. For health.

Submissions will be accepted via the Yemassee Submittable page through January 15, 2016.